Thursday, June 20, 2013

“By
serving his own interests, as Adam
Smith put it more than 200 years ago, he served the interests of
society.”

Comment

The
rest of the article is behind the WSJ pay-wall. Hence, I can only comment on
the above sentence alone.

It
may have gone on to clarify how the raw statement is or should be qualified, or
it may have gone to spout the all too usual fantasy that all self-interested
acts, albeit unintentionally, are beneficial to society’s best interests,
endorsed from an assertion by Nobel Prize-winner, Paul Samuelson, who
intentionally used the word “selfish”, as in “that each individual in pursuing
his own selfish good was led, as if by an “invisible hand”, to achieve the best
good of all” (1948, p. 36).

This
bold affirmation of Samuelson’s, fully and specifically attributed to Adam
Smith, has misled generations of economic graduates, plus other one-term only
students of Economics 101, and not a few philosophers, sociologists,
psychologists, and others, to accept it wholeheartedly and authoritatively with
Adam Smith’s blessing, or, worse, condemning Adam Smith for condoning the worst
excesses of what they believe about markets and “capitalism” because economics
guru, Paul Samuelson and hundreds of thousands of readers of his most popular
text: “Economics: an introductory analysis’, McGraw-Hill, in 19 editions to
2010.

The
sentence alone is clearly dubious.Millions of Individuals represent many different expressions of their
differing self-interests, including many that are mutually contradictory, and
not a few violently so.

What’s
that?: “I should pay to cross the WSJ subscriber barrier and see for myself if
the raw statement is qualified?”No thanks. (Though any reader with a subscription to WSJ is welcome to copy it to me).

I
am fully acquainted both with the implications of the naked statement,
endlessly repeated across the world’s media and at all the conferences of
brilliant scholars I attended from 2005 to 2009, and I am also fully acquainted
with the fall-out by those economists who abandoned Adam Smith’s ideas on the
amoral implications of the nonsense invented (not too strong a word) by the
otherwise estimable Paul Samuelson and is epigones who should have known
better.